Complex text layout

[Jeffrey Goldberg]

On Aug 30, 2008, at 4:11 AM, faja606 at aol.com wrote:

> I am trying to get my website to support multilanguage fonts,  
> complex text layouts. An example of what I am trying is to have the  
> fonts of other languages appear rather than boxes or question marks.

This is purely an HTML/web-design question, and has nothing really to  
do with FreeBSD even if your webserver is a FreeBSD system.  You  
should look at the LANG and DIR attributes.  Also, you should set up  
your pages do use UTF-8 as a character set.  To instruct your server  
to declare that documents are UTF-8 by default, you can set

   AddDefaultCharset utf-8

in your Apache configuration.

AddDefaultCharset is document at

   http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/core.html#adddefaultcharset

If you don't have access to the Apache configuration, you can declare  
the charset to use within each document in the HTML, with something like

  <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

within the HEAD portion of the document.

The LANG and DIR attributes are documented at

   http://htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/attrs.html#lang

though that is more of a reference document than a "how to".


Cheers,

-j


-- 
Jeffrey Goldberg                        http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/